CHAPTER 8

Notes taken by Lucas Fritzsche

The nuclear option

• Nuclear power has always been a cheap and effective option to create power
  • Uranium atoms are split in a chain reaction
    • è energy that heats water is created
    • è the steam created is used to drive turbines
• There are 436 nuclear reactors around our entire world, only eight countries have nuclear weapons

“Two problems – economics and the fear of nuclear weapon proliferation – are primarily responsible for blocking the once hoped – for expansion of nuclear power.”

Safety concerns

• Two main concerns are commonly elaborated:
  • Safety concerns

è Accident in Harrisburg in 1979,
è Accident in Chernobyl in 1986
è Accident in Fukushima in 2011

• Long term storage
  • Where should the nuclear waste be storaged?

Political/Moneytary Obstacles

• Nuclear power is one of the most effective ways to produce energy, but the most complicated to get permission to do so
• Since 1985, construction cost has escalated, it is not cost effective enough to build nuclear power plants anymore
• The time to get approval to create nuclear energy has increased heavily ever since, even though the regulatory process has been redesined to the industries liking

Success Story France

• in France, South Korea and some other countries nuclear energy is a great success
• in France, most power plants are owned by the French government
• France solved the problem of the long-term nuclear waste: through a process of reprocessing nuclear waste
• However, the process is very expensive and controversial, but relies on an impressive record of safety and reliability
• How it looks now, France is facing serious financial issues, but a lack of transparency in the finances it is difficult to get a view into it.

High Costs and Bottlenecks

- Cost estimates for constructing a nuclear power plant are increasing 15% a year.
- Very expensive to build nuclear power plants nowadays, not a single engineering firm is willing to give an estimate how much it would cost to built a plant in today's world
- A monopoly of certain supplies needed for nuclear powerplants is happening, therefore prices are very high and supply shortages are normal.
- A lack of standartization also promotes the problem by not having standardized processes

Problems of Scale

• - In the early years of nuclear energy, it was hard to merge the new idea of using nuclear power to economically create energy, and the reality
  • cost maximized
  • the scale of a nuclear power plant to make sure it was an economic success wasn't yet set or explored
  • Therefore the first powerplants weren't an economic success in the first years but are profitable now but face security issues now because of their age
  • Utility providers underestimated the additional cost of management of a power plant
    • yet there was only nuclear power plants in military or research establishments, where the management was provided or not needed
• When bottlenecks showed up, a lack of supply, it was more and more unattractive for utility providers to entertain a nuclear power plant, but they couldn't just shut it down: The economic and social pressure and responsobility wouldn't allow it
• Prices of service contractors and suppliers increased wildly, not only for steel, concrete, and engineering-and-design services, also capital availability:
  • Confidence in investing for nuclear power plants is decreasing, therefore it is hard to find investors that want to invest money on a long-term project where an economic success is unpredictable

The Nuclear Weapons Issue

• The deep concern of not only public opinion, but also politics is the concern about nuclear weapons proliferation.
• While it is way more difficult to enrich nuclear weapons than material for nuclear reactors, advances in enrichment technology made it easier since the last decade of heavily investing in this development by military forces of several states
• Concerned about a, for example, dictator that forces to secretly develop a nuclear weapon program by a team of scientists and engineers, most people are frightened of Nuclear Power

New Reactors

• Several researchers are working to find a way to solve the problems with the current generation of Nuclear Power Plants
• Aspirations:
  • cheaper to build
  • safer and cheaper to operate
  • far less vulnerable to catastrophic events
  • less vulnerable to terrorism
  • economically small in size to make them more attractive to smaller utility companies
• Several designs are tested right now, including:
  • "Generation 4", which uses liquid sodium to cool,
  • Very High Temperature reactors.
• More developed countries (obviously) invest more money in developing new ways to create energy using Uranium, however if a way is found, more developed countries wouldn't withhold the technology to developing countries with the argument of not trusting them not to built nuclear weapons
• A often proposed answer to this is an international establishment that authorizes and supplies safeguarded nuclear fuel for less-developed countries so the fuel stays under control of the developed nation that supplied it
• Therefore, complete control is never given to the less-developed countries
• Most developing countries disagree with the idea, simply by fearing economic loss and domestic power programs would be under control of another nation -> Independence

Fuel and Reprocessing

• The Idea of using Nuclear power as a major power supply in the world would challenge:
  • supplies of fuel
  • current uranium stockpile reseves
  • limited ability to safely and quickly expand uranium mining
  • and uranium processing
• Reprocessing fuel, how it is done in France, "recycling", is misleading the actual point, because it increases the amount of nuclear waste, however it decreases the amount of high-level waste
• Reprocessing is very expensive and could not be managed with the econical standpoint of a nuclear power plant
• Reprocessing creates Plutonium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, therefore it would be harder to manage to limit nuclear proliferation
• Experts from M.I.T. stated recently: "We know little about the safety of the overall fuel cycle, beyond reactor operation", therefore they concluded reprocessing is a dangerous and poor choice

Storage

• The controversery of where to story used nuclear fuel is going on for years now, no consens has been made so far
• No country has established a site that is meeting all criterions set by the international community:
  • location is chosen by its long-term geological stability
  • long term safety
  • tectonic stability
  • lack of risk posed by groundwater content and flow
  • deep enough, a perimeter far enough from population centers, but accessible to transporters of the waste
• Short-term sites have been established, until a solution has been found

The Nuclear Future

• Nuclear power plants are facing other global problems such as heat waves and global warming,
• Therefore shutdowns make the cost of nuclear-generated electricity even less competitive than it is already

Interested?

Nuclear Power - HowStuffWorks.com
The Future of Nuclear Power - MIT.edu
The Nuclear Option - Documentary - CNBC (direct video link)